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Financial

As my wife and I talked about the luxury of a car on the way home Saturday night, we tried to calculate what it would cost if we were to rent a car every weekend in a year and compare that to ownership, fuel, maintenance, insurance, and fees. This assumes that we would do without a car during the weekdays as we have been doing.

Between the late hour and focusing on driving the ever-busy toll road, my brain could not handle these calculations on the fly. Let’s try this again with a fresh brain and a calculator now that I returned the rental car yesterday morning and have the full financial damage to work with.

The weekend rate for this car for two days with 12% taxes - it’s 20% in the City of Chicago - is $85.10. For 52 weeks that comes out to $4,425.20. Gas is our responsibility so I’ll average what I bought for the two trips this week and annualize that for giggles: $28.22 x 52 =$1,467.44. Put the two together and you have $5,892.64 for the privilege of having an economy car two days a week.

A side trip to Edmunds’ True Cost to Own SMhttp://www.edmunds.com/apps/cto/intro.do with the specs on the car we are currently doing without offers up these annual numbers for our 2003 Subaru Forester based on 15,000 miles per year:

Without monthly car payments, our fixed costs of vehicle ownership currently comes out to $1,338.00, which is a combination of insurance ($1200), license stickers/plates ($78.00), and city sticker ($60.00). Maintenance on this car is low but still hacks into the budget about $500.00 a pop lately. Let’s be generous and say I’ve done upkeep about every 3,000 miles and that would be four times a year. $500 X 4 = $2,000.

Gasoline I’ll rough in based on our lower-than-average annual mileage of about 10,000 miles using a modest fuel efficiency for our Forester at 25 MPG (400 gallons) and $4.25/gallon, which is about where we are right now in Chicagoland and that brings us to $1,700. That’s pretty close to the $1,467.44 rental car number above.

Add them all together and you get this: $5,038.00.

Given that we have yet to hit 15,000 miles per year lately, this number makes Edmunds’ numbers pretty darn close. Let’s recap:

$6,818.00 Edmunds Year 5 cost

$5,892.64 Rental car

$5,038.00 My numbers

So even though the costs are pretty similar, it looks like we are not getting a better value with a rental car: fewer miles, fewer days, more hassle, and nearly another $900.00. The upside is a fairly new car that we do not have to maintain.